D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty canceled a private tour of the troubled Oak Hill Youth Center on Monday, a detention facility that is a subject of mayoral reform plans.
Fenty was scheduled to tour the facility, which has a history of overcrowding and security problems, with Youth Director Vincent Schiraldi and Council Member Tommy Wells, D-Ward 6, presumably for an update on a new, 60-bed maximum security building for juveniles planned near the current campus and to discuss an initiative laid out in Fenty’s plan for his first 100 days.
That action item would institute “assumption for responsibility of education and mental health” at Oak Hill, presumably through the creation of a commission that would increase interagency coordination with all District public school facilities. The commission is proposed in Fenty’s school takeover legislation. DCPS runs the year-round Oak Hill Academy at the facility.
The tour was canceled because of timing constraints, Wells’ Chief of Staff Charles Allen said. It will be rescheduled.
Oak Hill, a 188-bed facility run in part by DCPS, has been the target of controversial reforms by Schiraldi since he took over the department in 2005. He battled staff at the facility as recently as October, when he fired nine of its 11 managers. Employees fired back, accusing Schiraldi of being a “control freak” and of instituting policies that coddle the juveniles housed at the facility.
When Schiraldi took over, the facility was suffering severe crowding, with 261 confined and committed juveniles living within its walls. Since then, Schiraldi has introduced a number of reforms meant to help rehabilitate youth offenders without confining all but the most violent. The 80-bed Youth Services Center, which opened in 2005 as the District’s sole detention center for juveniles detained for sentencing, has also helped ease crowding.
Seventy-five juveniles were housed at Oak Hill on Monday, Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services spokesman LaShon Seastrunk said.
The 1960s-era structure, located on 888 acres about 30 miles from the District in Anne Arundel County, has also been targeted for closure by local and national leaders in recent years. Former Mayor Anthony Williams proposed its closure. Former Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, also proposed closing the facility, which was the subject of a 1986 lawsuit that delineated how the city should operate a juvenile detention center.
Most recently, Maryland officials have tried to close the facility because it now sits near prime real estate located near the National Security Agency. A new $40 million, state-of-the-art building to house violent offenders is planned to open at the Oak Hill campus in 2008. Groundbreaking for the facility has not yet occurred, but when it opens, all remaining facilities on the 47-building campus will close, Seastrunk said.
